


All the World for Love

by cher



Category: Peter S Beagle - The Last Unicorn
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006, recipient:Cyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-21
Updated: 2010-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/pseuds/cher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And if Amalthea remained Amalthea?</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the World for Love

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lissa for the incredibly helpful beta.

The Lady Amalthea was a melancholy woman, never quite present even if she was in the same room. She was the most beautiful thing in the house - in the world - and the most terrible, so old and full of grief that she seemed transparent with it.

It seemed she'd been full of grief as long as he'd known her, as if she'd never been anyone else. As if she'd never spoken to him of sorrow, and the way it could not touch her. She wore regret as she'd worn moonlight, once, as if it were made for her.

Once, her forehead had been marked no matter how she scrubbed her face, the silvery star shining sometimes when no one was looking. Now her features were plain and all the more striking, for all that when she sat alone she looked like she missed something about herself.

The tinkers and the travellers who came to their house now and then whispered among themselves about the tragedy of her, this beautiful, beautiful woman left alone by her husband the runaway Prince. They cast sideways glances at Schmendrick, wondering how a young wizard came to be left with the care of her.

He wondered, himself. His care had never been good for her, after all. Although perhaps that was the point somehow; he didn't know. Her ways had always been strange to him, whatever her shape.

Some of them thought they knew who she was, who she had been. The children, especially, saw something about her, and listened harder besides. He never could remember that children had ears that heard and thoughts that spun meaning from the words they caught, and so he and Molly argued in whispers that crawled around corners and slipped through keyholes.

Molly forgave him for staying young while she aged like a husk of corn, growing more wrinkled and irascible by the day. She never forgave him for Lady Amalthea. She never forgave herself, and when she closed her eyes for the last time it seemed a relief to her.

Lady Amalthea turned another shade paler with grief, so that Schmendrick sometimes thought he could look right through her and see the hearthstones beyond.

The tinkers and travellers brought tales of the country roundabouts, how robbers in the forest came and went, that Jack Jingly's son had married at last, how Hagsgate was cursed still. The Lady Amalthea sat and listened without appearing to attend, and the travellers saw her interest and wracked their memories for some small story they could tell, that they might be the one to lessen her burden somewhat. All her life, while she became ordinary and plain, or as ordinary and plain as it is possible for a person of her fairytale to be, the people who saw her marvelled, and contorted themselves to win a look from her.

They brought songs, in case music warmed her. (Schmendrick liked these, and gave some thought to setting his own life to a ballad one day.) They brought flowers, sweet breads and ripe fruits and soft cheeses, in case it was the stone house that was lonely and not the Lady Amalthea herself. They brought news, and one day the news made her lift her head, and open her mouth as if she might speak.

Schmendrick had to catch the tinker when it seemed he might fall from the wonder of having come near to hearing her voice. He had to sit the man down with a good strong brandy before he would tell his story again. But he found his voice eventually, after Schmendrick had begun to worry it had gone off courting the Lady Amalthea's voice now forever.

They both spoke, in the end; the first word she had spoken in longer than Schmendrick could remember, and more words than the tinker had uttered in his life, in response.

King Haggard's castle had fallen.

They rode out immediately, of course. Schmendrick took the tinker's carthorse, bought for a look from the Lady Amalthea. She rode the white mare she kept to watch in the field, and she needed no bridle.

Schmendrick could hear the sigh of the breeze around her as they passed, and the way the land tried to bloom for her, now that she moved with something like hope. Still she did not speak, but he thought she was nearer to it than she had been.

He missed Molly beside them, then, Molly who would never believe he had become as silent as Amalthea through the years. Molly who would have scolded him until he had to raise his voice to save the skin on his bones. It was true that hope was a fleeting thing, and he wished he could better appreciate irony; the wizard cursed with immortality and the Lady with age and forgetfulness, both despairing at the sight of one another.

Still, lives like theirs called to one another, and besides their fairytale could not be over when their enchantments held strong. Lír had been good at the order of things, had known their happy ending could never be that. He knew what he took from the world when he took Amalthea's hand, and when she had grown into a woman and not a girl, she had known it too. It hadn't been enough.

And so years and years ago Lír rode off to make things right, the curse of a hero, proof of the myth of happy endings. Every day he didn't come back, Lady Amalthea grew older and more translucent. Every day Amalthea suffered, Molly grew more wrinkled. And Schmendrick watched them both, and kept the house running around them.

It almost hurt to see her hope again.

The mare picked up its pace, hurried under Lady Amalthea, and they rode and slept in short snatches and after a time both longer and shorter than Schmendrick expected, they saw the cliffs.

The castle had fallen, left the cliffs their own craggy selves again, save for one broken turret that lay drunkenly across the horizon.

The sea was empty.

They rode to Hagsgate, to find ruin and despair. Drinn shuffled by, his stare accusing and yet drawn to the Lady Amalthea.

"Please," said Schmendrick, finding that the word had come back from its long vacation. "Tell us what happened."

Drinn blinked and looked at the Lady, and it seemed he spoke despite himself. "My son destroyed us all," he said, his voice a ragged sound. "It's what comes of witches."

The Lady Amalthea drew in her breath sharply, the fastest movement she had made in years. She spoke, again, and a passing swallow flew close to hear her.

Drinn nodded, once. "Lír. The enchantment on the castle - he couldn't break it. We tried to stop him. And then he brought in a stonemason, and a miner, and a sapper, and then he sent them away again. We thought he'd gone; we never saw him for years. I wish he had gone."

Schmendrick nodded, as if to himself. "He could have waited until the old man died, of course, but that wouldn't have been the end of his story. The castle would have fallen with Haggard, but then King Haggard was more full of spite than he was of blood and bone, and everyone knows spite will keep a person alive longer than any feat of magic there is."

The Lady Amalthea shifted beside him, turned to look at him, and that painful glimmer of hope hurt him again.

"Of course, we'll ride to the castle, Lady, but I think you should prepare yourself. He would have come for you, if he could."

She looked away toward the cliffs, and seemed more translucent than ever. They left Drinn where he stood, and rode until they found the caves under the place where the castle had been.

They left the horses and went inside the tunnels still warm with the heat of the Red Bull. They found the stone marked with charts, and diagrams, and marks of a stonemason's tools. There were piles of rubble where cavern walls had stood, and sinkholes where earth had lain, and blocks of stone where there had been tunnels.

"`Yet none but one of Hagsgate town may bring the castle swirling down'," Schmendrick murmured. "Heroes are an old-fashioned sort, and he knocked the castle down in the old-fashioned way. It took him a lifetime. And I worry that it took him a life."

They searched, and they didn't find Lír's bones or any trace of him, though the stone rang with the tread of the Lady Amalthea's feet, and the tunnels echoed with the despair in the words she did not speak.

It drew close to evening, and they knew it even in the gloom of the tunnels. Schmendrick, as he had done only once before, laid his hand on Lady Amalthea's arm. She shuddered all over, the way she had in Mommy Fortuna's cage, but she allowed herself to be led from the tunnels. He couldn't hold her once she stepped outside, though she made no movement to shake him off.

She went down to the sea and stood looking out. She was older than the sand under her feet and sadder than the wind in November. The sea was empty but for the waves, and the caverns were empty even of his bones.

She stood with her back to him, and she spoke once more. "I wanted to die when he died." The breeze stooped to listen to her, and she turned. Schmendrick would remember her there for all of his long life after, older than the moonlight, fixing him in her terrible gaze. "Tell the world about him, about what he did. Remember him."

And she seemed to waver there, an outline of herself, until he could see the waves through the bones of her hands. And then she was gone, and the world weighed down heavier and the sun sank away, and the sea fell silent.

Schmendrick sat down on the sand, and sang a little.

"We can love, but what we lose -  
What is gone is gone."

 


End file.
